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Scarfs vs. scarves

Scarf has two plurals—scarfs and scarves. Scarves is the preferred form, but scarfs is the original and was more common before the 20th century. It’s still used, but only less than once for every 20 instances of scarves.

The switch probably happened by analogy with other words ending in f sounds.1Wife, half, and leaf, for instance, are inflected wives, halves, and leaves, and likening scarf to these more common words is only natural.

Scarfs is also a simple-present inflection of the verb scarf in the sense to eat quickly and voraciously. The word is a newly formed American variant of a little-used British sense of scoff, 2 and it is usually embedded in the phrasal verbscarf down—for example:

When I give my dog a biscuit, he scarfs it down in half a second.

Examples

In books and periodicals published before the 20th century, scarfs is easier to find than scarves. Here are a few examples: